Al-Haditha is identified with the site of the biblical village of
Hadid. In 1870,
Victor Guérin visited and "at a quarter of an hour's distance south-east of Haditheh, [he] found several ancient tombs cut in the rock. The village of Haditheh he found to be on the site of an ancient town.
Cisterns, a birket, tombs, and rock-cut caves, with cut stones scattered about, are all that remain." An official
Ottoman village list of about 1870 showed that "El Hadite" had 28 houses and a population of 145, though the population count included only men. In 1882 the
PEF's
Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) described the village as "a moderate-sized village on a terraced Tell at the mouth of a valley at the foot of the hills, with a
well on the east. There are remains of a considerable town round it, tombs and quarries exist; and the mound on which the village stands is covered with pottery."
British Mandate era In a
census conducted in 1922 by the
British Mandate authorities, Hadata had a population of 415
Muslims, increasing in the
1931 census to 520, still all Muslims, in a total of 119 houses. In the
1945 statistics, the village had a population of 760 Muslims, while 16 dunams were built–up, or urban, land. File:Al-Haditha 1940 looking northwest.jpg|Al-Haditha 1940, looking northwest File:Al-Haditha 1942.jpg|Al-Haditha 1942 1:20,000 File:Beit Nabala 1945.jpg|Al-Haditha 1945 1:250,000 File:Lydda and Ramla area - 9 July 1948.PNG|Depopulated villages in the
Ramle Subdistrict 1948, aftermath Early in 1948, the
Mukhtar of Al-Haditha met to negotiate a non–belligerent agreement with the neighbouring
Ben Shemen. However, Al-Haditha was depopulated during the
1948 Arab-Israeli War on July 12, 1948, under the first stage of
Operation Dani. Part of the village was destroyed in 1948, and the remainder in 1967. The project is only the second Israeli archaeological investigation of a Palestinian village from the modern era. ==References==